We received our Diamond Certification in November 2009 and at that time, only five other businesses in New Zealand held Diamond certification. There are now 31 business with Diamond Certification.

This certification is equivalent to achieving ISO 14001; the International Environmental standard for good environmental management.

Energy saving technologies were incorporated in the 2011 / 2012 refurbishment of our site and are mentioned in this 6 minute You Tube clip. The refurbishment was also featured in the August 2012 issue of Trends Magazine. Wait a couple of seconds for page 8 to load and click through to page 15 to see the full story.

We set ourseles some challenging environmental targets for 2013 which we either achieved or came close to achieving. Our performance against three of those targets is outlined below.

Electricity

Target

Electricity consumption to be 15% lower than our predicted usage - taking into account the outside temperature, the number of working days in the month and the number of staff.

Result

Not met. While our usage was the lowest since we began monitoring, our electricity consumption was down by 13%, against predicted levels. We are looking at other opportunities for reductions.

Waste to landfill - from our gantry bins

Target

80 tonnes.

Result

Not met. The weight was 83 tonnes.

Water use

A water leak caused a large spike in use during 2010. The leak was fixed and the dramatic reduction in water use was a combination of fixing the leak and water saving technologies provided by the refurbishments.

Target

1000m3.

Result

Not met. While our usage was the lowest since monitoring began in 2007, our water use was 1072m3 .

The experience of the water leak highlighted the value of monitoring our usage as there were no indications of a leak apart from a spike in the readings. Tracking our environmental aspects on site means that we can fix issues as they arise.

Further initiatives

We also had a couple of big ticket environmental items in 2013, the first being the conversion of our Fire Lab from diesel to LPG. This provides a cleaner burn and a reduction in our Co2 emissions. The second item was the replacement of our onsite treatment plant in April 2013 and the graph below shows the dramatic reduction in fecal counts from the plant.

Our readings for the first six months of 2014 are so low (12,680 cfu/100ml), they barely register on the chart. The readings for 2013 are only for 11 months as no readings were taking during the month the plant was being replaced. Our targets for 2014 have been adjusted to cater for the new steady state of coliform readings.